A Memory of Amaretto
by IShouldBeOverThis
Summary: Dark Mycroft/Sherlock.  Mycroft is far more dangerous than Sherlock realized.  Can be seen as following A Small Note Regarding my Brother.  Several triggers


Sherlock pressed his palms into the brick wall. His hands would probably be skinned tomorrow, but none of that mattered. Scabs heal. Scars form over damaged flesh.

The man behind him grunted appreciatively, "God, you are so beautiful."

Since the man was looking at Sherlock's back and Sherlock's pants were around his ankles, it was probably a good guess that the man—Toby was his name, not that that mattered either—was talking about Sherlock's arse, although he had been appreciative of Sherlock's face in the pub.

"Fuck me," Sherlock commanded. He heard Toby fumble for a moment and then a slickened finger was pushing inside him, and then another. It was a little too rough and it burned. The fingers withdrew and he could hear Toby tearing the condom package. Then he was thrusting in. He wasn't large, but Sherlock wasn't that well prepped and he knew he'd be sore.

Toby was a married construction worker with two children and lived out in Barnett. And once a month he told his wife that he was going drinking with his mates but instead, picked up some pretty, posh boy, if he could get one, who reminded him of a childhood neighbor so he could fuck them in an alley. Toby was nice and relatively gentle and had wooed Sherlock with flattery, not that Sherlock needed it or particularly wanted it. He'd been mildly impressed with Sherlock's deductions about him, but that may have been flattery too just to get in Sherlock's pants.

Well, it was better than the ones who wanted to come and then slap you across the mouth for taking them so they could feel better about what they were doing, as if engaged in some perverse class warfare.

Sherlock stroked himself. He was barely hard but he needed to come tonight and he doubted that Toby was going to return the favor, or last long, for that matter. He ran through his litany of fantasies, meager as they were. They were made up more of body parts than actual people. A stretch of kissable neck here, a sturdy shoulder there, mouths, tongues, backs, legs, hands. Some he'd experienced, some he had only seen in passing.

There was one that he didn't like touching in his mind, but it always worked: the memory of feeling Mycroft's thick, solid cock through their trousers when he was seventeen. Both drunk, sharing a hotel room after some cousin's wedding. In the end they were both too drunk to do anything at all and had woken the next morning, head's aching, itchy and uncomfortable in wrinkled tuxedos; Sherlock rushing to the bathroom to vomit. He remembered the softness of Mycroft's fattening belly pressed against him and the taste of brandy in Mycroft's mouth mingling with the taste of Amaretto in his own.

He rubbed himself faster. He was close now, if he could beat Toby who was gasping away, it would all disappear for a moment. He focused on the remembered taste in his mouth, Mycroft's lips and tongue, Mycroft stroking him through his trousers, and came against the wall. It was a sad little orgasm, nothing to write home about. Sherlock had to stifle a hysterical laugh. He felt lightheaded and a little giddy.

_Dear Mummy and Daddy,  
__Just had a very unsatisfactory wank in an alley while a middle-aged nobody fucked me in the arse. Hope you both are well.  
__Love,  
__Sherlock_

And Toby, perhaps feeling Sherlock's muscles close down on him, came. There was silence as they both tissued off, straightened themselves up and generally moved on from the encounter.

"Well," Toby said, "that was great, just great." He patted Sherlock feebly on the shoulder, as if they had just played a game of darts. "You take care of yourself, now. There's a lot of evil people out there."

Sherlock nodded tersely, and in the silence Toby walked back up the alley to head off to home and wife. He'd fuck her tomorrow with renewed vigor.

When he walked out of the alley, the black car was waiting. There was no point in resisting. He'd tried every trick he could think of, from dodging the CCTV, to walking through pedestrian sections where the car couldn't follow, but it was always waiting somewhere down the line, perhaps it was a different car at different points. Ultimately the driver would step out and hold the door. None of them had ever actually manhandled him, but they had made it fairly clear that not coming with them was not an option.

Generally they took him to one of Mycroft's offices: the official one, the unofficial one, the secret one, but not yet the top-secret one. He was surprised when this time they took him back to his own digs, but once escorted up the stairs he saw why.

Mycroft was sitting primly in the room's only chair, an overturned packing crate in front of him over which a small cloth had been laid with two cups and a thermos of presumably some very nice tea.

"Do Queen and country know what you do with your time and their money, Mycroft?"

"I assure you that I would never be so crass as to fake my expense reports, Sherlock. Tea? It's a lovely Darjeeling from a very private source of mine in the region. Shall I be mother?"

"You'll never be mother. I don't want your tea or your company. I would like you to go. I would prefer that you had never come."

Mycroft continued to smile his placid smile as he produced his small notebook, as if every minute of his no doubt overwhelming schedule were not recorded in his assistant's Blackberry. Like the umbrella that was hooked over the back of the chair, it was an affectation that drove Sherlock mad with disgust.

"I see that you are due for your six month AIDS testing next Thursday, Sherlock. Don't make me send someone. We should probably have you taken to a dentist as well." He nodded at the chauffeur who wrote in his own small notebook, presumably to take to the assistant, wherever she might be.

"I am always careful."

"Nevertheless, accidents do happen, and blood is blood, whether they tear their knuckles smacking the sneer off of your face, or in the general way.

"Well, even if you won't have some tea, I shall." He began to open the thermos.

"Do what you like. I'm going to have a shower. I suppose it's too much to ask that you be gone when I get back? I'm amazed that you haven't brought an entire range of low tea pastries and desserts. I can see that you've been indulging."

"Low tea? At one in the morning? Really, Sherlock, have your standards slipped so far?" Mycroft said this as if Sherlock proposing cakes in the early morning were far worse than shagging strangers in alleys.

Sherlock grabbed his sponge bag and a relatively clean towel from a dresser drawer and stalked out of the room to the common shower down the hall. The lukewarm water from the tenement's overstrained boiler was neither refreshing nor relaxing and although he wanted to stay under its spray until Mycroft might be forced by his duties to leave, he knew from experience that it would soon become icy. And that Mycroft seemed to find unlimited time to torment him.

Mycroft was still there daintily touching his mouth with a serviette when Sherlock returned, towel around his hips.

Sherlock sat on his bed, and on a whim, or a hunch, or just a theory, leaned back and spread his legs slightly so that his inner thighs were revealed almost all the way to his groin. He smiled lazily at Mycroft, curious what he would do.

Mycroft took the position in with a slight purse of his lips. "James, you may go. Tell my assistant that I shall be a short while."

When James had gone, Sherlock leaned back further, so that he was resting on his elbows. If this played out as he suspected it would, then Mycroft would never dare lord anything over him again.

But Mycroft was the only man in London who could outthink Sherlock, and as soon as the door shut behind James, he moved with a speed and surety that Sherlock would have thought far beyond his brother in his portly state.

Mycroft straddled Sherlock's legs, while he pressed his umbrella across Sherlock's chest from bicep to bicep, pinning the younger man with all his weight to the bed.

"Do you want me to push you face down on the bed and fuck you, little brother? Fuck you without lube so I rip you open and I'll still make you come, maybe more than once, and you'll be begging me for more?

"But I won't Sherlock, and do you know why?

"Not because I have any qualms about the morality, but because I don't fuck people who are just using sex to flagellate themselves. Is that what you want, to add incestuous to your list of worthlessness, along with drop-out, druggie, prostitute and slut? I won't give you one more whip.

"Anyway," he said sitting up and lifting the umbrella, but still holding Sherlock down with his hips, "you may have been a tasty thing once upon a time, but junkie thin and depravity ravished you're somewhat shop-worn goods. I have far more attractive partners that I could contact. Ones who enjoy sex and enjoy themselves while having it."

He spun his umbrella so that he was tilting Sherlock's head back painfully with the handle, holding it lengthwise as if it were a snooker cue. "Do NOT push me, little brother. You have no idea what I can do. Do you think I got where I am by being nice, Sherlock? Do you think that my polite façade is who I am? I can destroy far better men than you, and I have when it served greater ends.

"You are an _embarrassment_ to me, Sherlock. If I were not so essential, if anyone else were capable of handling my position and responsibilities, you would have hampered my rise in the service. Many men and women in my position wouldn't have hesitated to have their nearest and dearest locked away for the rest of their lives for the risk you pose."

He stood back up, pulling the umbrella from Sherlock's throat, as he adjusted his waistcoat and tie.

"But," he continued in a much softer voice, "I care about you. I worry about you constantly. You are a hindrance to my work because you take too much of my focus."

He paced the room as he continued speaking. Sherlock stayed where he lay, too stunned to move. He realized that he was shaking. He'd never really seen this side of his brother, although he'd suspected it existed. It scared him, but it tantalized, as if he were at last seeing his brother at his most real.

Mycroft was going on, "I know the secrets of every person with power in the world, Sherlock. Those you may have heard of and many more that you haven't and never will. It's part of my job to make sure that the public never will. I know their tastes, their needs and their desires, and believe me, their perversions would make our incest look as sweetly innocent as holding hands while skipping through the park.

He spun suddenly to pin Sherlock again, but this time with only his eyes, "I do not want those people to win, Sherlock, even though it is…expedient for them to do so now, expedient for England and her tenuous, humble place at the big-boy table. I do not want those people to own the world. I do not want 'Korporation Uber Alles,' with untraceable multi-nationals buying countries to own their own flags of convenience, answerable to no one.

"But I cannot do it alone. There are a few others with the intelligence, the grasp and the understanding to help me, and I'm in contact with them all, no matter their nation, but you are the best, or you could be."

He twirled his umbrella one more time so that the tip was touching Sherlock's windpipe, one good thrust and he would crush Sherlock's hyoid bone. But Mycroft only held it there, as light as a caress.

"Someday, Sherlock, I will need you to be on my side. To be engaged in the bigger picture. I would like it to be your choice. I would like you to volunteer willingly and happily, ready to do good with your talent and your gifts. But make no mistake, I will make you if I have to, and I will even make you think it was your own idea. Do you understand me?"

There was a pause, blue eyes meeting blue, in an unseen static charge.

"It wasn't a rhetorical question, Sherlock. Do. You. Understand?"

Sherlock didn't want to back down. With anyone else he wouldn't have considered it, and with Mycroft in his usual persona of proper civil servant, he wouldn't have, but this was a new Mycroft, powerful and terrible. He broke eye contact first, but when he mumbled his assent it was in a peevish tone, unwilling to allow Mycroft a complete win.

"Do speak up, Sherlock. You betray your breeding when you mumble like that." And just as abruptly the surface Mycroft was back, all gracious smiles and silent superiority.

"Well, with that cleared up between us, I'll take my leave. Busy day in the morning, you know. For me, at least. I don't know what you do with your day."

"Of course you know," Sherlock replied.

"Yes, I suppose I do. Bear that in mind."

Mycroft packed his little tea party into a hamper from under the chair.

Sherlock felt suddenly shattered. The tawdry sex, the long, bereft day, the absence of cocaine and Mycroft's presence conspired together to exhaust him. Still wearing the towel he curled onto his side away from Mycroft.

But he had forgotten that there was a third Mycroft in the room. Beyond the prim English gentleman, beyond the dangerous mastermind, there was Mycroft the brother.

In a soothing voice, like one coaxing a wounded animal from where it's hiding, Mycroft said, "Don't sleep in a damp towel, Sherlock. It will get into your sheets and you'll wake shivering."

Reluctantly Sherlock pulled the towel from under his hips and dropped it on the floor. All thoughts of seducing Mycroft long abandoned.

"There now," Mycroft pulled the duvet up to Sherlock's shoulders. "Isn't that better? Don't forget Thursday." He left, turning out the overhead light as he went.

Mycroft walked down one flight of stairs and stopped on the landing where he was certain that Sherlock could not hear him and leaned his head against the wall.

He wondered when Sherlock had begun to loathe himself so much. Was it his fault? That moment of weakness ten years before?

It had been cousin Matilda's wedding and the full hotel had required him to share a room with Sherlock. Sherlock had become absurdly drunk very early in the evening. He had been on the dance floor, Mycroft remembered. All limbs and angles, dancing slowly with himself, like a Cubist painting, in a continuous state of falling. And God, he was beautiful. Face lightly flushed from the alcohol, too-long, black hair tumbling into his eyes as if he had just been tumbled in someone's bed and there were guests of both sexes eyeing the inebriated youth in a hungry way.

Mummy had come up beside him, "Mycroft, take Sherlock up to his room, please. I think he's overly tired."

So he had walked his brother from the dance floor. Removed from the music Sherlock slumped into his arms as they walked to the lifts, all animation gone, so that by the time they reached their floor he was being half dragged along. Mycroft had to hold him against the wall with his shoulder to get the door open. Once inside he simply dropped him on the bed and went to fetch a glass of water.

To his surprise Sherlock was sitting up when he returned.

"Mycroft?"

"Yes, Sherlock."

"I feel funny," He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet and started to topple forward so that Mycroft was forced to put the glass down quickly and catch him. Sherlock's arms wrapped around his neck, head nestled into his shoulder. He smelled of almonds.

Amaretto, thought Mycroft. That's what he'd been drinking.

"Mycroft, I need, I need…" Sherlock mumbled, his breath hot through Mycroft's shirt.

"You need to drink some water and go to sleep."

But Sherlock lifted his head and pushed his mouth into Mycroft's. It was almost a fall, the way it happened, but his mouth opened and Mycroft responded, a desperate part of his mind screaming at him to stop. Sherlock's delicate body pressed into his, the sugary taste of his mouth was too much to bear. His alcohol heated body burned through their clothes.

Sherlock fell back against the bed taking Mycroft with him, and for a few moments there was labored breathing, the wet sounds of lips together and soft moans. But unexpectedly Sherlock went completely limp and Mycroft realized that he'd passed out. He knew he should roll his brother over to make sure he didn't choke in the night. That he should probably wake him up to drink some water, even manage to move him so that his legs weren't hanging off the bed, but like the voice in his head, it was all too far away, and he felt himself dropping off, half sprawled across Sherlock's body.

In the morning Sherlock ran to the bathroom first thing while Mycroft stretched his twisted muscles. Neither of them referred to it at all.


End file.
